Ada Lovelace Day 2016 -- A Celebration Of Women In Science And Technology

Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2016 is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of Women in Science and Technology. It is held on the second Tuesday of October each year, and last year I had the privilege of being invited to speak at the flagship event, a "science cabaret" held in London. While "ALD" has been a firm fixture in my calendar for a few years now, many people are still unfamiliar with the celebration. Last week I was thrilled to have been asked to speak on a panel discussion on Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths organised by Digital Science in London alongside ALD founder Suw Charman-Anderson, who I grabbed for a quick low-down on the big day. I would like to thank Suw for taking the time to speak to me, and wish her lots of luck for the big day tomorrow. I also hope that you feel inspired to attend an ALD celebration near you, and perhaps even get involved in setting one up next year!

Suw Charman-Anderson: Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM. Founded by me in 2009, it is now held every year on the second Tuesday of October. It features a flagship Ada Lovelace Day Live! ‘science cabaret’ event in London, UK, at which women in STEM give short talks about their work or about other women who have inspired them, or perform short comedy or musical interludes with a STEM focus.

The day also includes grassroots events around the world, organised entirely independently from the ALD Live! event. These events take many forms — from conferences to Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thons’ to pub quizzes — and appeal to all ages, from girls to university students, to women with well-established careers. This year, we have over 70 events in about 50 cities across 6 continents!

Kundu: That sounds amazing! Can you tell me a bit more about what ALD is for?

Charman-Anderson: Ada Lovelace Day aims to raise the profile of women in STEM by encouraging people to shine a light on those women whose work, discoveries and achievements that they admire. We hope that by taking part in Ada Lovelace Day, people will learn about the amazing achievements of our unsung heroines. Many of our most successful women have never been given the credit they deserve, overshadowed by the men that they worked with for no better reason than that it was just “how things were”. And many of the women working in STEM today go unnoticed and unremarked.

As a result of the activity around Ada Lovelace Day, we also hope to make it easier for conference organizers to find women to talk at their events, and for journalists to find women to comment on STEM stories, or to even be the story. We hope that women struggling to understand why their achievements are being downplayed by peers and bosses will take heart from the stories they see, and will fight even harder for the equality they deserve. We hope that mothers and fathers and teachers will find inspiration to pass on to their children and students, even finding inspiration themselves. And we hope that young girls will see that it’s not just OK to love science, tech, engineering and maths, but that there are real opportunities for them, at school, at university, and at work.

Kundu: Why did you choose Ada Lovelace as the face of your campaign?

Charman-Anderson: Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, writing a program to calculate Bernoulli Numbers on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Although Babbage himself wrote other fragments of programs, none were as elaborate or complete as Lovelace's, and hers was the first published. But more than that, Lovelace foresaw the role that computers could play not just in science but also in art. She saw that the Analytical Engine could, given the right inputs and algorithms, create music and art. The Analytical Engine, she wrote, “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In this, she was truly visionary, though the importance of her groundbreaking work wasn't recognized until 100 years later, when Alan Turing discovered it and quoted her in his seminal paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

Kundu: Where can we attend ALD events?

Charman-Anderson: Ada Lovelace Day Live! is our flagship science cabaret, hosting this year by The IET, and featuring a fabulous array of women from around the UK STEM world. Our speakers are design engineer Yewande Akinola, planetary physicist Dr. Sheila Kanani, science writer Dr. Kat Arney, developer Jenny Duckett, mathematician Dr. Sara Santos, computational biologist Dr. Bissan Al-Lazikani, and climate scientist Dr. Anna Jones — each of whom will be giving a ten minute talk about their work. The evening is being compered by award-winning comedian and author of the new book The Science of Games of ThronesHelen Keen. Full details of the speakers are on our website. Tickets will be available on the door from 6.30pm until 7.30pm when the performance starts, and for people not in London, there are over 70 events in some 50 countries around the world, and details of those are on our map. And if there's nothing nearby, we encourage people to organize their own events next year! We even managed to hold events in Antarctica last year, so there is no excuse to not get involved!

Kundu: Surely the ultimate goal is to make days like ALD and organisations like the Women's Engineering Society (WES) obsolete. What can we do to address these issues? Is there anything that the general public can do to help secure this change?

Charman-Anderson: I would be delighted if we achieved true equality and ALD was no longer needed! But I think that's a long way off, and in the meantime there are very concrete things that people can do, every day, to help create change. Ada Lovelace Day and Digital Science have launched a project to develop guidelines for people -- men and women -- in STEM to help them bring about the change that we've been talking about for so long. We would love people to contribute to this toolkit; simply tweet @DigitalSci and use the hashtag #WiSTEMspotlight to add to the thoughts that were collected at our panel event and in subsequent discussions.

The idea is to develop a list of simple actions that will support women in STEM and that we can turn into habits in our own lives. Some of those ideas are focused on the things that men can do, such as refusing to speak on all-male panels at conferences, and some of them are things we can all do, such as amplifying women's voices in meetings or becoming more aware of our unconscious biases that work against women. It might take decades to create genuine parity at a societal level, but it only takes a couple of months to create a new habit!